65

Amazigh diachrony remains a fairly virgin field, with aspects still enigmatic in various areas, such as phonetics, semantics, lexicology, syntax and morphology. This contribution aims to fill one of the gaps in diachronic Amazigh studies. This is an etymological study of a category of Amazigh names that were sometimes ignored or misunderstood by predecessors. In this contribution, the corpus analysis method provides us with a rigorous framework for shedding light on the etymology of nouns in waw-. The database on which we have relied is formed on the basis of rigorous criteria: authenticity (the toponymic landscape), representativeness (the geographical area), diversity (written and oral) and homogeneity (the same category). Drawing on a multitude of selected sources: toponymic data, dictionaries, linguistic studies, attested lexicons, etc., we have created an authentic, representative and diversified corpus. We have shown that the prefix waw- is simply a w- (determination support in Amazigh and mark of masculine) + a (deictic and mark of number) + old verb awy “to bring, gather, contain...”). This enigmatic determination support highlights the evolutionary trend of Amazigh names and the origin of the state vowel.